The Trials of a Chubby Yogi

When you're overweight, yoga class can make you feel anything but Zen.

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Let me tell you about the Scorpion pose. Picture this: You support your body on your forearms and kick your legs up in the air, handstand-style, then go into this incredible backbend as you reach your feet toward your hands and your head toward your feet. It sounds impossibly awkward (or impossible, period), but it’s elegant. Even outside yoga class, I daydream about the Scorpion, envisioning myself striving for perfection.

We’re not doing the Scorpion today. Today we’re doing hip openers, and I’m trying to focus, until the teacher interrupts me. “Don’t worry,” she says, giving me a quick pat as she breezes by. “You’ll get there eventually.” The teacher doesn’t urge anyone else to try again next time before she’s finished trying now. I haven’t given up by a long shot, but Buddha lady thinks I should give it a rest. And I know why: It’s because I’m fat.

I also happen to be an extremely adept yoga student.

When I started doing yoga seven years ago, it wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t a lot of chanting or relaxing. It was hard work, and it was emotional. The triumph of mastering a new pose, the disappointment of failing to stay in position, the euphoria that inevitably hits whenever I’m upside down for extended periods. When I got serious about yoga, my classes became a sanctuary where I trained my body to relax and my mind to concentrate. Yoga helped me conquer demons I used to medicate away with antidepressants. It made me feel free.

But after I got pregnant, I developed anemia. I felt so sluggish that I convinced myself yoga was less important than lying on the couch while my husband shoveled pierogies into my mouth. I gained more weight than was healthy, but I planned to go back to yoga and get in shape after I delivered my baby. Except the delivery didn’t go quite as I had planned.

Truthfully, I can’t say what I had planned except to have a cute baby and smile for the pictures afterward. Instead, I got 30 hours of induced labor followed by complications that ended in an emergency cesarean section. I also fell into a depression, started on Zoloft and gained more weight, partly as a side effect of the drug. But I was so grateful to feel like myself again that I almost didn’t mind. Besides, once I felt better mentally, I was ready for yoga again. I wanted to get back into the game.

Of course, now that I had a baby, I had to make some changes to my old routine. Instead of going to my favorite studio, I bought an unlimited pass to one closer to home, with a class schedule that fit around my son’s nap times. When I hit the mat at five months postpartum and 35 pounds above my optimal weight, it was painfully obvious that a few other things had changed, too. Moving into my first handstand, I felt the strain in my wrists, due to the extra pounds. My usually intense seated forward bend felt muted by a new roll of belly fat. My ankles ached in high lunges. I told myself I simply had to work harder, that there were advantages to starting over. I could rediscover the beginner’s highs and appreciate the milestones I’d been taking for granted. Maybe the extra weight would turn out to be a blessing.

One change I hadn’t counted on was the teachers’ treating me differently. Over the course of three weeks, six different instructors approached me to offer extra encouragement. They’d stare at my sweaty face and bulging belly and say, “Remember, Child’s pose is always available to you,” or “You can do it!” Maybe I was being oversensitive, but I had more experience than many of my skinnier classmates did. So why were my teachers suggesting that I stay in a pose because I was doing so well in it, while urging others to try the more advanced variation?

My defenses kicked into high gear. Bent on proving myself, I’d assume a pose as soon as the teacher intoned its Sanskrit name, eager to show everyone that I didn’t need the English translation. Whenever I crapped out of a pose, I’d mutter, always within earshot of the teacher, “I just had a C-section. My scar isn’t healed.” I was ashamed of myself for whining yet desperate for approval—or at least for the teacher to treat me like everyone else.

Then I saw an instructor do the Scorpion, and I fell in love. It incorporated all the things I adore about yoga: a backbend, being upside down and the fact that it looks much harder than it is. Once you’re in it, you’re supposed to lift one or both hands to support your chin, which makes the pose seem casual, as if you’re hanging around, waiting for an actual challenge.

I jumped at the chance to try it. I was the first one at the wall, where you learn new poses. I went into Dolphin pose then kicked up my legs, loving the stretch, and rested my feet on the wall. Almost there, I thought. And then it happened: My teacher walked by and said, “I like your spirit.”

As far as cruel and demeaning comments go, “I like your spirit” isn’t too bad. Still, in my touchy state, the remark felt like a handshake at the end of a first date, code for “Thanks for a nice evening, but I won’t be calling you.” Everyone else was expected to be able to do this pose, to push themselves to the limit. I was the only one getting credit for merely trying. How about “Keep going!” or “Curl your tailbone in!”—which is what she was saying to the rest of my classmates. I felt totally demoralized.

My weight made it impossible for anyone to see my ability, it seemed. I didn’t finish the Scorpion. I couldn’t. Instead, I came down from the pose and made my usual lame apology: “I just had a baby.” What I meant was, “You have no clue what it takes for me to stay here, despite everything I’ve been through. You say you like my spirit? Honey, you have no idea.”

Later that night, when my husband asked about my bad mood, I sniped, “You try taking care of a baby all day!” Gently, he suggested that I needed to make more time for yoga. I didn’t have the heart to admit that I’d been there that very day. But I began to wonder, Could it be that yoga—and not the demands of caring for an infant—was contributing to my bad mood?

Even when I was in top form yogawise, I’d never been the thinnest in the room, never been someone who floated into the poses. But I didn’t mind that. Yoga was a challenge for me; I liked it that way. I hoped that meant it would never seem rote. Yet now, whenever I drove to the studio, I’d sit in my car for a few minutes before slowly trudging up the stairs. With dread. In class, when a teacher drew near, I’d pray she wouldn’t comment. I was so tired; getting into shape felt so hard. Why couldn’t they leave me alone?

With the baby, everything in my life had changed: my sleep schedule, my body, my freedom. I had counted on yoga to be the thing that stayed the same. But in my new body, the one I didn’t recognize, I could no longer do what I used to do. Maybe that’s what bugged me: I’ve always been an overachiever, and I still thought of myself as an advanced yoga practitioner. I didn’t want the teachers to congratulate me for merely showing up.

I felt worn down from envy and need. I was also sick of stretching into Downward Dog and, once there, peering through my legs at my classmates to gauge who had more defined triceps or whose heels were closer to the ground. Did it truly matter what my classmates could or couldn’t do? Wouldn’t it be more gratifying to measure myself against my own abilities? If I wanted to move forward in yoga, I needed to stop wallowing in the negative. I couldn’t let the drama of my son’s delivery be the story of my life. I had to see the grace in starting over, to find the glory in doing something for the second time. If I kept relying on an arsenal of excuses for why I looked the way I did—the antidepressants, the pregnancy, the misery, the fear—I’d be denying the drive that kept me coming back to the studio, despite the humiliations, real or imagined. I wanted to feel healthy and happy again. If I pushed myself hard enough, maybe I could get there. Or maybe it was enough to know that right now, I was doing the best I could do, whatever anyone else might think of me.

I began making a point of keeping my mouth shut when I couldn’t master a pose. No excuses. No worrying about other people’s expectations or wondering what they thought of my weight. I needed all my energy to rebuild my body and repair my confidence. As I turned my focus inward, I began to ask myself if it had been my desperation, not my weight, that compelled my teachers to patronize my efforts in the first place. After all, yoga instructors, like the rest of us, are human. And most humans can’t help but take a step back in distaste when they sense someone is too needy. It was time to call a truce with the teachers I thought condescended to me, the classmates who outshone me. I decided to forgive them. More important, I decided to forgive myself.

I am on my back in my new favorite teacher’s yoga class. A few months have passed since that first failed Scorpion. I am not much thinner, but I am much stronger. Still, in the middle of doing core work, I get tired and quit. (Yoga possesses special ways of making your midsection scream.) My teacher stands over me, teasing, “C’mon, Cathy, just a few more. You’re not here to rest.” I don’t tell her my name is Taffy. I don’t feel especially guilty. After all, I’ve been through a lot—becoming a mother, beating depression. Not that I’m complaining. Time has built layers of tissue between me and my past hurts. My scars are healed, and I’m no longer willing to let my self-esteem depend on what others think. I’m learning to be kind to myself, in life and in the yoga studio, to focus on what I’ve accomplished and let the rest go. Besides, I’ve done the Scorpion today, and not even against the wall. I don’t need anyone else to tell me that’s awesome. I know it for myself.